Bombs away! So now the 38th Ryder Cup is, officially, war, thanks to the revelation that Corey Pavin, after radiating nothing but sweetness and light since his arrival in Wales, has called in the military to stiffen his team's spine.

Given the state of the world, it is easy to deplore the US tendency to go about winning a golf match as if it were a part of Operation Enduring Freedom. But if that is the approach they want, they certainly picked the right leader. Corey Pavin may not have packed that notorious camouflage cap for this trip, and he has lost the military moustache, but his true colours have now come into view.

Ryder Cup captains are always trying to convince us that there is no need to do anything special to motivate their players because the mere experience of competing in the Ryder Cup is more than enough of a spur, and Pavin himself was at it today. "I just don't think the guys need to be motivated," he said. Colin Montgomerie, his opposite number, had the same message. "The only motivation this team needed was to lose the Ryder Cup two years ago," he said.

In the privacy of their respective team rooms at the Celtic Manor Hotel yesterday evening, however, their actions said something very different, while illustrating the severe contrast in attitudes to the task at hand.

Pavin's decision to fly in Major Dan Rooney to give an address to his players was immediately reminiscent of Ben Crenshaw bringing in George W Bush, then the governor of Texas, to sharpen the team's appetite for battle on the eve of the crucial singles matches at Brookline in 1999 by reading out a celebrated letter from a beleaguered American soldier during the defence of the Alamo.

American captains set great store by the help of the military. In 2004 Hal Sutton invited the commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier nicknamed The Big Stick, to provide a sonorous invocation at the opening ceremony at Oakland Hills – in vain, as it turned out.

Two years ago Paul Azinger enjoyed greater success when he swiped an idea from the US Navy Seals and divided his 12 players into three "pods" of four, the better to create personal bonds.

And now Pavin has brought in a fighter pilot to turn his platoon of men in argyle checks into the Dirty Dozen, on a mission to retain the trophy with a victory on foreign soil for the first time in 17 years.

"It wasn't so much a motivational speech per se," he explained. "I want these guys to be accountable to each other and have each other's backs. And basically that's what happens in the military. To talk to a fighter pilot and [hear about] the things that he does, night runs, just all of the stories, it was really entertaining and quite fun. And it was pretty emotional, actually. But a good kind of emotion."

Two members of the team gave their reactions. Phil Mickelson, who was present in the team room at Brookline and is competing in his eighth Ryder Cup, clearly found the words compelling. "It was the quietest I've ever seen an audience," he observed. A more startling and subjective take on the pilot's speech came from Bubba Watson, a 31-year-old Ryder Cup rookie whose father served in Vietnam. "He [Rooney] was talking about the Stars and Stripes and about how he represents our country and gives us freedom," he said. "All of us were emotional for what he does that lets us play golf and play in the Ryder Cup."

Deep emotions were being stirred there, of a kind that do not necessarily seem entirely appropriate to the context, which is a game of golf between two sets of millionaires. Nor are those emotions easily accessible to the European team, who sail under the insignia of a multinational trade association and whose only common allegiance is to their golf tour. No heartstrings are tugged when the EU flag is run up the pole. No European fighter planes will skim through the south Wales valleys to bring tomorrow's opening ceremony to a spine‑tingling climax.

The choice of Europe's inspirational voices highlighted the contrast. While Major Rooney was holding his audience spellbound with tales of the US mission to bring freedom to the world, the European golfers took a phone call from Seve Ballesteros – "our legend" Montgomerie said of the former captain, who is recovering in Santander from brain cancer – and listened to a talk by the great Welsh scrum-half Gareth Edwards on his experiences with the British and Irish Lions.

Montgomerie cannot summon up the memory of heroism and sacrifice at Yorktown, the Alamo, Vicksburg, Okinawa or Da Nang, or evoke the images of soldiers hoisting the tattered Stars and Stripes at Iwo Jima or defusing improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan. Some of the nations represented in his team, in fact, spent significant parts of the 20th century fighting each other.

Given the lack of a common heritage on which to draw, his task is the relatively straightforward one of the captain of a sports team preparing his team to go out and play – which is the way it should be in any sensible environment. But the nonsense of an almost unhinged militarism has prevailed before in this competition and may do so again this weekend.